Prepared for a Purpose: Author remembers standoff with gunman

Thursday

Feb 6, 2014 at 12:01 AMFeb 6, 2014 at 11:18 AM

ATLANTA - Antoinette Tuff was just a child when she confronted death. It came in the shape of a rattlesnake, crawling along a hot patch of South Carolina dirt. What happened next in her grandmother's garden would prepare Tuff for another encounter, years later, when death reared its head in a metro Atlanta elementary school.

ATLANTA — Antoinette Tuff was just a child when she confronted death.

It came in the shape of a rattlesnake, crawling along a hot patch of South Carolina dirt. What happened next in her grandmother’s garden would prepare Tuff for another encounter, years later, when death reared its head in a metro Atlanta elementary school.

That lesson came back to Tuff on Aug. 20 when a man dressed in black and carrying a semi-automatic rifle entered the office of Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Academy.

Officials identified him as Michael Brandon Hill, 20. They would later characterize him as “a young man with a long history of mental-health issues.”

What happened next is the stuff of headlines — and the answer to every parent’s prayer.

In contrast to the shootings of innocents at Columbine, Virginia Tech and Sandy Hook, no one was killed at McNair. All the students, faculty and even the gunman survived.

Tuff is the reason.

That tense encounter forms the nucleus of Prepared for a Purpose, her account of how she dealt with a suicidal gunman.

The 151-page volume, which touches on other events in Tuff’s life, places the reader in a school office where a bookkeeper averted a tragedy.

The book, co-written with New York author Alex Tresniowski, was published last month.

“I think God prepared me for all this,” said Tuff, 47, who has taken advantage of her celebrity to found Kids on the Move for Success.

The nonprofit organization provides underprivileged children with educational opportunities.

As she recounts in her book, Tuff grew up hard and hurting. Her father abandoned Tuff’s mother and other children when she was 2.

She and her mother became homeless. When she was 13, she met the guy she thought would be her mate forever. She dropped out of high school. They had a daughter, married, then had a son. The son was born with an array of disabilities and is in a wheelchair.

Through all this, Tuff said, she kept her faith, a belief that God would help her through life’s cruelties.

She has faced her share of them.

As she recounts in her book, she learned while engaged to the man who would become her husband that he was engaged to someone else.

“That was a sign, wasn’t it?” Tuff said. “I got lots of signs.”

Later, her husband left her.

And at no time was she more on her own than on Aug. 20.

The ordeal began when the gunman entered the office.

“This is not a joke!” Tuff quotes the man as saying. “I need you to understand this is not a joke. I am here. This is real.

“We are all going to die today,” he told her.

“He was pacing fast, like he couldn’t control his energy, like he wanted to scream and bust out of his skin,” Tuff writes. “Instead, he raised his rifle to eye level and made a move for the side door.

“The side door,” she continues, “is the door that leads to the classrooms where the kids are."

He never reached the classrooms.

Instead, he stayed with Tuff, who carefully brought a young man back from the brink, even after he wounded himself with the rifle.

At the end, with police ringing the school, Tuff writes, the gunman was ready to surrender.

“You can tell them (police) to come in now,” he said. “I need to go to the hospital.”